


Forbidden (Pro)Creation

by Shadow_of_Quill



Series: Biomagical Manufacturing [3]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Post-Pacifist, Sans-centric, Unhealthy nonromantic nonsexual relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 04:50:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12101082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadow_of_Quill/pseuds/Shadow_of_Quill
Summary: "Paps would make a great mom!""yeah, he would. too bad it's not gonna happen."





	Forbidden (Pro)Creation

Papyrus is fine. Sans makes sure of it. Papyrus has friends, and Papyrus has Sans, and Papyrus is fine.

Papyrus is fine.

 

The human child, Frisk, frees them all from the Underground, and Papyrus immediately sets to making friends with other humans. He and Sans find a nice house, not too large, not too small, near the suburbs of a fairly monster-friendly city.

Papyrus is friendly and cheerful and energetic as always.

Papyrus is fine.

 

"So is drinking so much milk a skeleton thing, then?" the cashier asks. Sans deflects. It's what he's good at.

He keeps half-an-eye on the amount of milk in the fridge, but it doesn't rise unexpectedly.

Humans must not drink it as much as he thought.

 

They're play-wrestling on the couch for the remote control - Papyrus wants to watch a marathon of some car show, and Sans loves his brother, but not enough to put up with eight hours of that when there's a comedy film he's never seen before on another channel - and manage to knock it onto a documentary channel.

They both groan. " _WHY_ DID WE MAKE IT A RULE THAT ANY THIRD CHANNEL THAT COMES UP WHEN WE'RE FIGHTING FOR THE REMOTE IS THE COMPROMISE CHANNEL?" Papyrus asks, disgusted.

"cut down on the number of broken remotes," Sans reminds him, slumping down to watch the screen. Papyrus rearranges him so they're tucked against each other.

"- miscarriages led to stillborn children," the human on the screen says, the images behind them making it all too clear what the unfamiliar word means. Sans snorts despite himself at the pun - _still_ born, despite being dead, and lying _still_ when they were. 

Papyrus stiffens. Sans looks at him, expecting to be lambasted for his disrespect (which he might deserve), but Papyrus doesn't seem to have noticed it at all as he stares at the TV, listening intently as the human goes on about birthrates and health of mothers and other things Sans couldn't care less about.

"good thing that can't happen to us, huh, pap?" he asks, keeping his voice gentle.

Papyrus jumps at the question, stares at Sans as if he's been caught doing something wrong. "I - YES! YES, IT'S A - VERY, GOOD THING," he gets out, stumbling over the words. He shoves himself off the couch, unintentionally tipping Sans over, and heads for the door. "I HAVE JUST REMEMBERED AN INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT THING THAT MUST BE DONE BY ME ELSEWHERE, BROTHER! CONGRATULATORY MOTIONS ON WINNING CONTROL OVER THE TELEVISUAL CHANNEL!"

He's gone before Sans can stop him, vanishing off to who-knows-where.

Sans isn't really in the mood for a comedy after that, so he puts in a DVD about astronomy that Papyrus bought him for Christmas ("IT'S LIKE GYFTMAS WITH A LESS EXPLOITATIVE ORIGIN!" Papyrus had cheered when they learned about it) and settles down to watch it.

(In the back of his mind, he turns over the concept _stillborn_ again and again, trying to work out why it seemed to mean something to Papyrus.)

 

Tori makes sly suggestions to Undyne and Alphys about eggs. Sans can't help rolling his eyelights a little - his punpal is great, one of a kind, but she's just a little bit obsessed with children and doesn't seem to understand that some people might not want to have them.

Tori notices his reaction, and laughs. "No chance of our hearing the patter of little skeleton feet, I assume?"

("So when do you think Pap's going to be ready to make a second attempt?" Aers asked Scalene, fingers tapping on his arms. "I mean, I know we don't want to rush him, but it's getting a bit..."

Scalene shrugged. "We are asking a child to provide on his own an amount of magic that would normally require at least two fully-grown monsters working in tandem. If we push him before he's ready, he could burn out and be unable to ever make more."

"Yeah, yeah, I know." Aers sighed. "Let's hope this wait means the next one has better stats - we couldn't send _Sans_ out against the humans, it'd be murder!")

Sans feels his grin tighten, but laughs it off. "sorry, punpal, that's not gonna happen."

"You think so? That's too bad," Undyne says, grinning. "Paps would make a great mom!"

A wave of possessive jealousy crashes through Sans - _He's mine, I'm not sharing, we don't need any more siblings!_ \- but outwardly he just shrugs at her. "yeah, he would. too bad it's not gonna happen."

 

Papyrus is acting in a way Sans has never seen before - guilty, worn-down, and overenergised, all at once. Sans goes looking for the cause, but none of their friends can tell him anything helpful.

Out of desperation, he asks Papyrus himself. "everything okay, bro? you seem kind of down, lately."

Papyrus hesitates, wavers, and for a horrible moment Sans thinks that maybe he'll get more honesty from this than he's prepared to handle - but all Papyrus _says_ is that he has a new hobby, and he's wondering if he should give it up.

Sans' advice is as generic as Papyrus' explanation, but it seems to make Papyrus feel better, so Sans thinks he's won.

He hadn't noticed Papyrus making dollhouses before that conversation, but he's more than willing to let Papyrus have all the room he needs for them.

(He doesn't ask how making dollhouses out of plywood and cardboard helps lower Papyrus' energy, despite that coming from an excess of magic.)

 

Frisk and Monster Teen are visiting. They ooh and aah over the elaborate constructions Papyrus has made, switch the tiny lights on and off, open and close the doors between rooms. Papyrus beams, telling them how he chose the decor and wired the houses and crafted some of the furniture with his own two hands, and Sans hangs out in the background to watch Papyrus' gleeful excitement. He's not allowed near the houses themselves - "FOR FEAR OF DASTARDLY JAPES!" - but he's thinking that maybe he'll try to talk Papyrus into letting him watch as the next one is made.

It's been too long since he saw Papyrus making something.

Papyrus asks his visitors if they'd like to help him choose his next purchases. When they agree, he darts off to fetch his catalogues, ordering them to "PROTECT MY HARD WORK FROM MY BROTHER!" Sans pouts at him, and is masterfully ignored while the two adolescents solemnly swear to do their best.

"So cool," MT breathes. Frisk nods, wide-eyed, and carefully peels back the bedclothes on one of the beds. Papyrus comes back through the door just as MT exclaims, "Wow! Hey! Is that an actual skeleton?!"

Sans perks up, ready to tease his brother about trying to make himself "a skele-ton of fun!" or something similar, but when he looks at his brother Papyrus isn't embarrassed or oblivious.

Papyrus is terrified.

It vanishes the next moment, before either of their visitors notices, but Sans knows what he just saw.

He buries it in the back of his head, along with everything else he tries not to think about.

 

("Do all skeletons drink that much milk?")

("He really wants to -" "- make a second attempt. Maybe this one'll be better?")

("Wow! Is that a skeleton?")

 

He's alone in their house. Papyrus won't be back for a couple of hours.

It's just curiousity, Sans tells himself (he knows he's lying).

 

He finds the first tiny skeleton in the first house he looks in. It's not even hidden, really, just tucked into the bathtub.

He can feel Papyrus' magic in the multicoloured bones.

Sans yanks the tiny babybones out of the model house and stares at it. It's ridiculous that such a tiny thing could be such a huge betrayal.

He crushes it and lets the dust fall to the floor, shaking with the depth of his fury. He'd be replaced by _this?_

He turns vengeful eyes on the other houses, and thinks for a moment of literally tearing them apart to find how many betrayals are hidden in them - but no. He remembers how brightly Papyrus smiled when he was talking about them, and however hurt _he_ may be, he doesn't want to hurt _Papyrus_ like that.

Even if that isn't as mutual as he always thought it was.

 

By the time Papyrus gets back, Sans has gathered every single instance of his treachery, laying them out on the table so that Papyrus will have no opportunity to pretend ignorance. The little things lie in sad little heaps, several of them broken (so much for being better than Sans, they're just as weak and so much smaller, they're tiny they're useless they're worthless they're broken WHY DID PAPYRUS FEEL HE NEEDED TO MAKE THEM?) because Sans wasn't going to bother being careful moving stupid little things that should never have been made in the first place.

"SANS! I'M HOme" Papyrus stops as soon as he sees what Sans has found, sockets trained on the table covered in his misdeeds.

"i think you've got some things to explain, right, Pap? 'bout twenty-eight of them," Sans says bitterly.

He can see Papyrus counting the - the _dolls_ on the table, and only finding twenty-seven. When Papyrus looks at him, the pain and confusion on his face is enough to rock Sans a little, but he hides his uncertainty and lets his smile twist into the closest he can make to a sneer.

"SANS, WHY?" Papyrus asks, waving at the broken dolls on the table. "I DIDN'T - THEY WEREN'T -" he stumbles to the table as if drawn there, straightening out the dolls as if it matters how neat and tidily they're laid out.

Tears are spilling from his sockets, and Sans isn't feeling as sure of himself as he was. The uncertainty gets worse when Papyrus starts whining - it's a sound Sans hasn't heard in _years,_ not since that day when the scientists responsible for them (their _family)_ died.

It's the sound Papyrus makes when he's trying not to cry.

It's the sound Papyrus makes when he's crying anyway.

Those little - _things_ aren't worth this much pain, he wants to say, they aren't family -

"WHY DID YOU BREAK THEM?" Papyrus asks, heartbroken. "THEY AREN'T PEOPLE, THEY'RE JUST THINGS, THEY CAN'T REPLACE YOU SO WHY CAN'T I EVEN HAVE THEM?"

Instead of all the things he could be thinking, _should_ be thinking (why is this hurting Papyrus so much, why is _Sans_ hurting Papyrus so much, can his own hurt feelings really be worth causing his brother so much pain), Sans finds himself wondering when he last saw Papyrus make a femur, when he last tripped over one or saw another box filled with them.

He's not stupid. He knows that Papyrus was _created_ to make other skeletons, that the femurs were a stopgap to keep Papyrus' magic from overbuilding till it burst him open.

The little babybones must have been his stopgap since they came to the surface, Sans realises, and he tries to use that to draw his anger back so he can stop feeling so bad about hurting his brother -

and out of nowhere he remembers that human word.

**Stillborn.**

Born still, still born, he'd laughed to Papyrus about how good it was that that couldn't happen to monsters and here he was looking at a table of  
of Papyrus' dead children. Stillborn children.

 _"He'd make a great mom!"_ Undyne's voice echoes in his skull, and the way Papyrus had frozen and stared at that documentary as if it was unveiling some great truth of his life, and Sans wants to throw up as he finally, _finally_ realises this was never about replacing him.

Papyrus hasn't been making siblings.

He's been making _children._

And he never took that final stop to bring them to life because  
because Sans would have tried to kill them.

His hands fall to his sides, and he tells himself that he's imagining the itch where that coloured dust was on them before he brushed it off.

Papyrus is still crying, still looking at his (dead, never-alive) children, hands hovering over the broken ones and Sans feels a lurch in his nonexistant gut as he realises that Papyrus wants to heal them and feels that he can't, thinks Sans wouldn't allow it. He's not making Papyrus admit that he broke an agreement _they never made in the first place,_ he's just torturing him by proving he'd never have been allowed even this much self-comfort if Sans had known about it.

"paps?" Sans asks, and his voice is shaking as he forces himself to step forwards.

Papyrus looks back at him, and he's hurt and scared but there's no blame in his face, no anger, no hate, and Sans has to stop for a moment to swallow down tears of his own.

There's no way he deserves Papyrus' forgiveness.

There's no way he can bring himself to refuse it.

"paps, m'sorry," he says, voice small, and Papyrus' fear slowly melts into confusion.

"YOU'RE... SORRY?" he repeats, and Sans cringes, because that must be the most useless thing he's ever said (and one time he promised to protect a human child if one ever entered the Underground). "FOR WHAT?"

How can Sans answer that? _For hurting you like this? For forcing you to choose between having children and me? For damaging your stillborn children? For not recognising they're your children?_

"all of this?" he tries, with a shrug and a quick wave of his hand.

"WHY?"

 _Because I thought you were trying to replace me._ But Sans doesn't need to say that, not when Papyrus already knows, not when he's bent his own feelings and instincts into knots to try not to hurt Sans.

 _Because I didn't think about what it meant that you want children._ Just thinking about saying something so honest makes Sans feel like he's choking on the words.

"guess i... never really grew up too much from that kid in the lab who heard that the next one was gonna be better," he mutters, trying to make the words loud enough for Papyrus to hear them.

Papyrus just looks more hurt. "HOW COULD THEY BE BETTER THAN YOU?" _That's why I made them like **this**_ hangs in the air between them.

"it wasn't about what other people think, paps!" Sans explodes, not sure how his intelligent brother could miss such an obvious fact. "it was always about if _you'd_ replace me!"

Papyrus looks as if he's been slapped. "YOU... THOUGHT I'D REPLACE YOU. WITH _ANYONE."_

He's finally made Papyrus angry.

The words don't want to come out, but he thinks he might lose Papyrus if they don't.

"i thought you were meant to."

"AND? SO? I WAS ALSO 'MEANT TO' MAKE MORE- OH." The realisation that Sans had been too much a child to separate the two undercuts his anger, leaving his pain on full display. "COULDN'T YOU HAVE TRUSTED ME, BROTHER?"

Sans can't answer him, not when there are twenty-seven damaged little bodies proving that the answer is no, not when there's a tiny pile of multicoloured dust in front of a dollhouse proving that the answer is no. Even now, he's not trusting Papyrus, he's just learning that he should have.

And that Papyrus can't trust him.

"m'sorry," he mumbles again, hunching in on himself as he realises that he still hasn't told Papyrus what happened to - what _he did_ to the twenty-eighth babybones. "y'should leave me. get a place where you c'n have actual babybones running around, and no one who's gonna -"

"SANS." Papyrus glares at him, not moving. "FOR ONCE IN OUR LIVES. **TRUST ME**."

Sans fights it, hard, but he can't win - he gasps once, and bursts into tears.

Papyrus has always been too forgiving of everyone, but when it comes to Sans, there is _nothing_ he won't forgive.

And it's terrifying, because Sans knows that he has and will abuse that over and over again, but. But this is Papyrus' choice, because they both know he could leave if he wanted to (not easily, not with all their lives binding them together, but there are so many people who would help him in this if he ever asked for their help) and they both know he chooses to stay.

"m'sorry, m'sorry, m'sorry, m'sorry..."

Two skeletons curl around each other and cry together.

 

"SO." Papyrus looks uncertain. "YOU UNDERSTAND THAT MY OTHER CREATIONS ARE NOT GOING TO STEAL MY AFFECTION FROM YOU."

Sans winces. "yeah."

"...WILL YOU TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED TO WORDART?"

"WordArt?" Sans repeats, then feels sick as he realises what - _who_ Papyrus must mean.

"i-i. i crushed them."

Papyrus draws in on himself, nodding. "WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE DUST?"

"left it. it's, uh, still in the dollhouse room." Sans feels disgusted with himself - it wasn't bad enough that his jealousy made him destroy Papyrus' creation, no, he had to leave the evidence to taint Papyrus' joy in the dollhouses...

...which he enjoyed making for his children, and every time Sans thought his opinion of himself had sunk to the lowest point it could go he'd remember what this was about and feel it sink further.

"YOU DIDN'T THROW IT OUT?" and there's a cautious hope to Papyrus' voice that has Sans blinking at him.

"uh, nope."

Papyrus stands up, pulling Sans with him - and stops. "I - WOULD YOU LIKE TO, WATCH?"

He's warier than he was with his previous question, but there's still a gleam of hope in his eyesockets, and Sans can't quite breathe at the trust his brother is showing him as he realises what Papyrus means. "y-you're - uh - gonna recycle them?"

"RECREATE," Papyrus corrects him. "NONE OF THESE HAVE SOULS, SO THEY DON'T HAVE MAGIC OF THEIR OWN, WHICH MEANS THERE'S NOTHING PREVENTING _MY_ MAGIC FROM REPAIRING THEM IF THEY GET DAMAGED."

Sans absorbs that in silence, and decides never to ask whether one of the reasons Papyrus never ensouled any of his children was in case Sans found out about them.

 

Papyrus' magic gathers the dust into something that looks uncannily like a more colourful version of Sans' trash tornado, hovering a foot above the ground.

Impulse has Sans saying, "you know, i'm pretty sure that's about as much physical stuff as you used making me."

Between the distraction of what he says and the joy Papyrus is feeling at being free to show Sans this, it's not so surprising that his concentration slips ever-so-slightly.

The two of them stare at the full-sized babybones hanging in midair, just waiting for a soul to complete it.

"so, we need a nursery," Sans says.

 

Some people would think it's not that simple. It is.

But it isn't anywhere near as easy as it is simple.

 

Three years on, they finally celebrate the 'birth' of Papyrus' first child.

Sans stares down at the multicoloured babybones that has just captured his finger, and feels his soul melt.

"they're perfect, pap."

"NYEH-HEH-HEH! OF COURSE THEY ARE!" Papyrus says with assurance. He holds Sans' gaze. " _ALL_ MY CREATIONS ARE PERFECT."

Sans will never try to explain to any of their friends why those words make him start crying with joy. (No matter how drunk they get him trying to find out.)

He's going to spend the rest of his life trying to live up to them. But he's also going to spend the rest of his life knowing that no matter how badly he may screw up, Pap already thinks he does.


End file.
